I have been playing OpenRA for a while now, and have recently got into modding it. I have been coding for several years now, albeit in different languages, but am hoping this mod idea is not too far out of my abilities.

Okay, so here is the reason I would like to make this mod. Just this year, my friends and I have been able to get a large group together to play online, and OpenRA seems to be the game of choice. The problem is when so many people are playing the game, many new to it and on old computers, the games tend to be unfair and laggy. My idea is to implement a shared base, team melee mode, where two or more player could work together to reduce the total amount of units in the game, and allow for more relaxed play.

So far I have created a basic rule changing mod, but think that in order to allow the ability to join bases, I will need to make it a stand-alone mod. I have been reading the provided guides online, and think that I can achieve it by altering the PlayerActor and WorldActor. I have made a checkbox for it in the lobby using the player.yaml file, but do not know how to further implement it.

Final description of the idea is that you check box the option in the lobby to allow for team melee. Players can then choose the same spawn as another player, thus signifying a shared base. When the game starts, any players on a shared spawn will be able to control each other units and share resources.

So I have been looking around on the resource center for custom maps that have some sort of shared base element, and found this type of map called SwitchShare.

Basically, the SwitchShare maps use LUA coding to allow for players to switch bases within their team on a few minute intervals. Also it implemented a shared resource feature for the team.

I think this is getting a lot closer to what I actually want. I could create a map with shared resources rules, and have team spawns right next to each other. The only thing I need now is a way to control your ally's units and buildngs.

Maybe I could use the Actor's Owner setting to set to multiple players?

I actually got into the OpenRA discord, and got some help on starting it up. I now have a somewhat working version where the mod itself allows for allies to control each other troops, and when using it with the specially marked melee maps, teams spawn close together and share resources.

Had to create my own copy of the OpenRA engine to do this, and change a few C# files.